The Power of Believing: Diving into Stephen King’s Fictional Tabloid ‘Inside View’

Stephen King is an interesting follow on the site formerly known as Twitter. When not posting about politics or his latest literary find, he’s ranting about the state of the world and making observations that position him as a sort of elder statesman in the horror community. A recent tweet by the Master of Horror mentions a bygone era of salacious magazines that harkens back to his early career: “Hey, do you guys remember that supermarket tabloid that used to have stories about BatBoy? Man, I loved that shit.”

The world-famous author is likely referencing publications like The National Enquirer and similar periodicals that used to grab eyes in checkout lanes with claims of Elvis sightings and alien encounters. Frequently inspired by the world around him, King has his own literary brand of tabloid journalism with Inside View, a rag that has been appearing in his work for decades. 

‘The Dead Zone’

Inside View began its life in one of King’s early classics, The Dead Zone (1979). This political thriller follows Johnny Smith, a teacher who awakens from a four-year coma with a disturbing ability to see into the past and future. When news of his powerful gift makes its way outside of the hospital, it peaks the interest of a sleazy periodical. Richard Dees, a journalist for Inside View approaches Johnny at his home with a lucrative offer to exploit this ability in a salacious column filled with parlor tricks and outsized predictions. Smith and his father summarily dismiss Dees and throw him off of their porch, valuing their privacy over a lifetime of lucrative infamy. But with this one interaction, an entity was born.

Inside View would become a fixture in King’s interconnected literary world and continue to appear in his novels and short stories for the next 45 years. 

‘Freaks’

But to truly understand the genesis of this fascinating magazine, we need to go even further back in time. King has always been fascinated by oddities and opens his first non-fiction work, Danse Macabre, with memories of childhood nightmares. In the first chapter, “Tales of the Hook,” King tackles the concept of monstrosity by exploring fascination with carnival sideshows and the impact of Tod Browning’s disturbing 1932 film Freaks. While much of this section would be considered problematic by today’s standards, it was an uneven contribution to early conversations about disability and acceptance. King also seems fully aware of the salacious nature of this exploitation. In a treatise on horror, he’s examining the concept of otherness and our tendency to fixate on physical differences as a way of reifying the social hierarchy. He insists, “it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply.” 

King credits The National Enquirer with sparking his own interest in monsters and even admits to being an occasional patron. In a footnote following a mention of the tabloid, he confesses, “I buy it if there’s a juicy UFO story or something about Bigfoot, but mostly I only scan it rapidly while in a slow supermarket checkout lane, looking for such endearing lapses of taste as the notorious autopsy photo of Lee Harvey Oswald or their photo of Elvis Presley in his coffin.” While King may cast slight judgment on the authors of these exploitative stories, he does not shame the readers themselves. He describes these stories with a mix of reverence, bemusement, and childish wonder. These grainy photos of alien autopsies, flesh-eating dogs, and grotesque physical anomalies once sparked his imagination and introduced a young horror fan to elements of the macabre that would inform his prolific writing career for decades to come. 

‘The Night Flier’